vC Ops : $This and the Super Metric

Firstly I want to thank Yuval for helping me in getting this Super Metric working. The idea I had around this dashboard was to show the up time of a host. Looking at the Resource Kind for the host system it is collected as an Array of seconds. Now the thing that got me a bit is that vC Ops collects all the data for a specific metric over a 5min time interval and then gets the avg value and stores this as the metric interval value. All good if u using data that is not associated with time…as the system up time metric. You cant really get the avg up time interval. So it looks like all the interval time is stored in an array. You need to get the Max[array value] and then use this value. Thus if the [array] values are [1,2,3,4,5] then Max[1,2,3,4,5] will give you an answer of 5.

That was issue number one…now for issue number two…

When I created the Super Metric I created a Super Metric called : Host Up Time. This I created as follow(note the 86400 = 60sec*60min*24hours):

The issue I got was when I assigned this Super Metric to the host it got no values…just a blue block with a ? inside it.

To resolve this we had to change the formula to this :

(max($This:A1178))/86400

This means that the metric value “A1178” (Meaning System Up time in Seconds) must be obtained from the object that the Super Metric is assigned to. Simple but if you did not know this like me…took me a while to get the correct answer.

My completed Dashboard looks like this. Very simple displaying two hosts with up time and there Health Status. I used Tags to create a Host tag 01 and 02 and assigned each host to a Tag. Then I assigned each tag to the Health Widget. (Read here about Tags)